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TO COOK A CHOWDER.

the allowed best cook of a chowder in all New England, and then proceeds with what I give you as a legitimate belonging to any faithful chronicle of the place I am describing :

"A Fish Chowder is a simple thing to make. For a family of twelve to fifteen persons, all you have to do is this:-In the first place, catch your fish —as Mrs. Glass would say—either with a silver or some other kind of a hook; a codfish, not a haddock, weighing ten or twelve pounds. There is more nutriment in the former than in the latter. Have it well cleaned by your fishmonger, (keeping the skin on,) and cut into slices of an inch and a half in thickness-preserving the head, which is the best part of it for a chowder. Take a pound and a half of clear or fat pork, and cut that into thin slices; do the same with ten or twelve middling-sized potatoes. Then make your chowder, thus:-Take the largest pot you have in the house, if it be not as large as all out-doors;' try out the pork first, and then take it out of the pot, leaving in the drippings.. Put three pints of water with the drippings; then a layer of fish, so as to cover as much of the surface of the pot as possible; next, a layer of potatoes; then put in two table-spoonsful of salt, and a tea-spoonful of pepper; then, again, the pork, another layer of fish, what potatoes may be left, and fill the pot up with water, so as to completely cover the whole. Put the pot over a good fire, and let the chowder boil twenty-five minutes. When this is done, put in a quart of sweet milk, if you have it handy, and ten or a dozen small hard crackers, split. Let the whole boil five minutes longer-your chowder is then ready for the table, and an excellent one it will be. Let this direction be strictly followed, and every man and even woman can make their own chowders. Long experience enables me to say this, without pretending to be a "cook's oracle." There is no mistake about it. An onion or two may be used, where people have a taste for that unsavory vegetable; but our New England ladies, those of Connecticut perhaps excepted, although extravagantly fond of onions, do not like to have their male friends approach them too closely, when they have been partaking of the "unclean root," and their breaths are impregnated with its flavor."

"With regard to clam chowders, the process is very different, but very simple. Procure a bucket of clams and have them opened: then have the skin

Then put into the pot

taken from them, the black part of their heads cut off, and put them into clean water. Next proceed to make your chowder. Take half a pound of fat pork, cut it into small thin pieces, and try it out. (leaving the pork and drippings in) about a dozen potatoes, sliced thin, some salt and pepper, and add half a gallon of water. Let the whole boil twenty minutes, and while boiling put in the clams, a pint of milk, and a dozen hard crackers, split. Then take off your pot, let it stand a few minutes, and your chowder is ready to put into the tureen. This is the way Mrs. Tower makes her excellent chowders. Clams should never be boiled in a chowder more than five minutes: three is enough, if you wish to have them tender. If they are boiled longer than five minutes they become tough and indigestible as a piece of India rubber. Let even an Irish lady-cook practise upon this direction for making chowders, and our country will be safe! In seasoning chowders it is always best to err on the safe side-to come "tardy off," rather than overdo the matter. Too much seasoning is offensive to many people, the ladies especially.

"Eels—the way to cook them.—I have a great mind to enlarge upon this subject, but will not at this time. I will only remark that the eel is a much abused and much despised fish; and yet, when properly cooked, it is as sweet as any that swims. Many, from ignorance, cut eels up and put them into the frying-pan without parboiling them: of course they are rank and disagree with the stomach. They should be cut up, and then put into scalding hot water for five minutes, when the water should be poured off, and the eels remain at least half an hour-to reflect on what the cook intends to do next! They are then fit for cooking-the meat is white and sweet, and free from that strong rancid flavor which is peculiar to them before they go through this steaming process. They are commonly used as a pan fish; but they make a delicious pie, (with very little butter) or a good chowder."

Our passage to Boston was a matter of five hours, and we landed at the "T" in a heavy rain, dined at the Tremont at three, and were at home in New Bedford at six, (per railroad,) having completed a circle of very agreeable travel in unmitigated Yankeedom.

Yours, &c.

LETTER FROM WALTON.

Freedom from Work-Excursion on the new Scenery opened by the Erie Rail-Road-Walton, on the West Branch of the Delaware-Plank Road -Sugar Maples-Stumps out-Spots to Live in-Cheapness of Life here.

WALTON, West Branch of the Delaware,}

MY DEAR MORRIS:-I came away to get out of harness, and be idle for a few days; but, as a horse, when turned out to pasture, takes a short trot before beginning to graze, to make sure that his load is not still behind him, I will try my hand this morning at an uncompelled scribble-stopping when I like, of course, or capering as the caprice takes me. Please, therefore, to consider me as a loose horse," and look for no method in my pranks or paces.

I date from a place so lovely, that I shall not be easy till I have sent every one here in whose knowledge of beautiful things I take an interest. A week ago I had never heard that there was such a place as WALTON. Probably, to most of the readers of

the Home Journal, it will be a town now first named. Yet, a neighborhood better worth adding to the sweet world which the memory puts together and inhabits, could scarcely be pointed out. Let me tell you something about it.

Walton sits on a knee of the Delaware, with mountains folding it in, like the cup of a water-lily. As I heard a man say yesterday, "they have so much land here that they had to stand some of it on edge," but these upright mountain-sides are so regularly and beautifully overlapped, each half-hidden by another, that the horizon, scollopped by the summits upon the sky, is like nothing so much as the beautiful thing I speak of—the rim of the waterlily's cup when half-blown. Steep as these leafy enclosures are, however, the valley is a mile across, and the hundred rich farms on its meadows are interlaced by a sparkling brook, which, though but a nameless tributary to the full river below, is as large as the English Avon. I breakfasted this morning on its trout, and a stream with such fish in it, I think, should be voted a baptism.

Walton has shed its first teeth-is old enough, that is to say, for the stumps to have rotted out-and of course it has a charm which belongs to few places so off the thoroughfares of travel. It was found and farmed early, say seventy years ago-the settlers who appreciated its beauties and advantages, leaving eighty miles of wilderness behind them. I may as well say, here, by the way, to enable you to "spot" it, that it is about eighty miles west of Catskill, and as far south of Utica. Until the opening of the Eric Rail-road, its produce reached market only by a heavy drag over the mountains to the IIudson, and, as it lay upon no route, northward or southward, it has remained, like an unvisited island of culture in a sea of forest. With so small a population, the numberless brooks in its neighborhood are still primitively full of

trout, its woods full of deer and game, and the small lakes in the mountains still abounding with pickerel and smaller fish. The necessaries of life are very cheap, delicious butter a shilling a pound, for instance, and other things in proportion. What a place to come and live in, on a small income!

Owing to a very sweet reason, (as sweet as sugar,) the meadows about Walton are studded, like an English park, with single trees of great beauty-the sugar-maples having been economically left standing for their sap, by the settlers and their descendants. You can fancy how much this adds to the beauty of a landscape free from stumps, and richly cultivated up to the edges of the wilderness. In fact, Walton looks hardly American, to me. The river and its mountains are like the Rhine, and the fields have an old country look, free from the rawness of most of our rural scenery. You see I am in love with the place, but, barring that I see it in June, with its crops all waving and its leaves and flowering trees all amorously adolescent, I picture it as I think you will find it.

How the Delaware gets out of this valley, without being poured over the horizon, is one of the riddles with which the eye plagues itself in looking down upon it from the hills. It apparently runs straight up to the side of the mountain, and, but for the swift current, you would take what is visible, of its course, to be a miniature lake. The roads on its banks, and in every direction out from Walton, are the best of country roads, and there are enough of them to offer every desirable variety in drives-this (take notice!) being an inestimable advantage in a country-place, and one which should be inquired into before a man settles himself with expectation cf pleasure in country life. Horses enlarge